At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the
ink-distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small
provincial printing establishments. Even at Angoulême, so closely
connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris,
the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which
the language owes a figure of speech--“the press groans” was no mere
rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used
in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dAbbéd the ink by hand
on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type
was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble,
literally deserved its name of “impression-stone.” Modern machinery
has swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press
which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for
the Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten, that
something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which Jérôme-Nicolas
Séchard set an almost superstitious affection, for it plays a part in
this chronicle of great small things.
Séchard had been in his time a journeyman pressman, a “bear” in
compositors’ slang. The continued pacing to and fro of the pressman
from ink-table to press, from press to ink-table, no doubt suggested
the nickname. The “bears,” however, make matters even by calling the
compositors monkeys, on account of the nimble industry displayed by
those gentlemen in picking out the type from the hundred and fifty-two
compartments of the cases.
In the disastrous year 1793, Séchard, being fifty years old and a
married man, escaped the great Requisition which swept the bulk of
French workmen into the army. The old pressman was the only hand left in
the printing-house; and when the master (otherwise the “gaffer”) died,
leaving a widow, but no children, the business seemed to be on the verge
of extinction; for the solitary “bear” was quite incapable of the feat
of transformation into a “monkey,” and in his quality of pressman had
never learned to read or write. Just then, however, a Representative
of the People being in a mighty hurry to publish the Decrees of
the Convention, bestowed a master printer’s license on Séchard, and
requisitioned the establishment. Citizen Séchard accepted the dangerous
patent, bought the business of his master’s widow with his wife’s
savings, and took over the plant at half its value. But he was not even
at the beginning. He was bound to print the Decrees of the Republic
without mistakes and without delay.
In this strait Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard had the luck to discover a noble
Marseillais who had no mind to emigrate and lose his lands, nor yet to
show himself openly and lose his head, and consequently was fain to earn
a living by some lawful industry. A bargain was struck. M. le Comte de
Maucombe, disguised in a provincial printer’s jacket, set up, read, and
corrected the decrees which forbade citizens to harbor aristocrats under
pain of death; while the “bear,” now a “gaffer,” printed the copies and
duly posted them, and the pair remained safe and sound.
In 1795, when the squall of the Terror had passed over, Nicolas Séchard
was obliged to look out for another jack-of-all-trades to be compositor,
reader, and foreman in one; and an Abbé who declined the oath succeeded
the Comte de Maucombe as soon as the First Consul restored public
worship. The Abbé became a Bishop at the Restoration, and in after days
the Count and the Abbé met and sat together on the same bench of the
House of Peers.
In 1795 Jérôme-Nicolas had not known how to read or write; in 1802 he
had made no progress in either art; but by allowing a handsome margin
for “wear and tear” in his estimates, he managed to pay a foreman’s
wages. The once easy-going journeyman was a terror to his “bears” and
“monkeys.” Where poverty ceases, avarice begins. From the day when
Séchard first caught a glimpse of the possibility of making a fortune, a
growing covetousness developed and sharpened in him a certain practical
faculty for business--greedy, suspicious, and keen-eyed. He carried
on his craft in disdain of theory. In course of time he had learned to
estimate at a glance the cost of printing per page or per sheet in every
kind of type. He proved to unlettered customers that large type costs
more to move; or, if small type was under discussion, that it was more
difficult to handle. The setting-up of the type was the one part of
his craft of which he knew nothing; and so great was his terror lest he
should not charge enough, that he always made a heavy profit. He never
took his eyes off his compositors while they were paid by the hour. If
he knew that a paper manufacturer was in difficulties, he would buy up
his stock at a cheap rate and warehouse the paper. So from this time
forward he was his own landlord, and owned the old house which had been
a printing office from time immemorial.
He had every sort of luck. He was left a widower with but one son. The
boy he sent to the grammar school; he must be educated, not so much
for his own sake as to train a successor to the business; and Séchard
treated the lad harshly so as to prolong the time of parental rule,
making him work at case on holidays, telling him that he must learn to
earn his own living, so as to recompense his poor old father, who was
slaving his life out to give him an education.
Then the Abbé went, and Séchard promoted one of his four compositors to
be foreman, making his choice on the future bishop’s recommendation of
the man as an honest and intelligent workman. In these ways the worthy
printer thought to tide over the time until his son could take a
business which was sure to extend in young and clever hands.
David Séchard’s school career was a brilliant one. Old Séchard, as a
“bear” who had succeeded in life without any education, entertained a
very considerable contempt for attainments in book learning; and when
he sent his son to Paris to study the higher branches of typography,
he recommended the lad so earnestly to save a good round sum in the
“working man’s paradise” (as he was pleased to call the city), and so
distinctly gave the boy to understand that he was not to draw upon the
paternal purse, that it seemed as if old Séchard saw some way of gaining
private ends of his own by that sojourn in the Land of Sapience. So
David learned his trade, and completed his education at the same time,
and Didot’s foreman became a scholar; and yet when he left Paris at the
end of 1819, summoned home by his father to take the helm of business,
he had not cost his parent a farthing.
Now Nicolas Séchard’s establishment hitherto had enjoyed a monopoly of
all the official printing in the department, besides the work of the
prefecture and the diocese--three connections which should prove mighty
profitable to an active young printer; but precisely at this juncture
the firm of Cointet Brothers, paper manufacturers, applied to the
authorities for the second printer’s license in Angoulême. Hitherto old
Séchard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks
to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial
enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this
piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business. Séchard thought
joyfully when he heard the news that the coming struggle with the
Cointets would be fought out by his son and not by himself.
“I should have gone to the wall,” he thought, “but a young fellow from
the Didots will pull through.”
The septuagenarian sighed for the time when he could live at ease in
his own fashion. If his knowledge of the higher branches of the craft
of printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was supposed to be past
master of an art which workmen pleasantly call “tipple-ography,” an
art held in high esteem by the divine author of _Pantagruel_; though of
late, by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance,
the cult has fallen, day by day, into disuse.
Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, bound by the laws of etymology to be a dry
subject, suffered from an inextinguishable thirst. His wife, during her
lifetime, managed to control within reasonable bounds the passion
for the juice of the grape, a taste so natural to the bear that M. de
Chateaubriand remarked it among the ursine tribes of the New World. But
philosophers inform us that old age is apt to revert to the habits of
youth, and Séchard senior is a case in point--the older he grew, the
better he loved to drink. The master-passion had given a stamp of
originality to an ursine physiognomy; his nose had developed till it
reached the proportions of a double great-canon A; his veined cheeks
looked like vine-leaves, covered, as they were, with bloated patches
of purple, madder red, and often mottled hues; till altogether, the
countenance suggested a huge truffle clasped about by autumn vine
tendrils. The little gray eyes, peering out from beneath thick eyebrows
like bushes covered with snow, were agleam with the cunning of avarice
that had extinguished everything else in the man, down to the very
instinct of fatherhood. Those eyes never lost their cunning even when
disguised in drink. Séchard put you in mind of one of La Fontaine’s
Franciscan friars, with the fringe of grizzled hair still curling about
his bald pate. He was short and corpulent, like one of the old-fashioned
lamps for illumination, that burn a vast deal of oil to a very small
piece of wick; for excess of any sort confirms the habit of body, and
drunkenness, like much study, makes the fat man stouter, and the lean
man leaner still.
For thirty years Jérôme-Nicolas-Séchard had worn the famous municipal
three-cornered hat, which you may still see here and there on the head
of the towncrier in out-of-the-way places. His breeches and waistcoat
were of greenish velveteen, and he wore an old-fashioned brown
greatcoat, gray cotton stockings, and shoes with silver buckles to them.
This costume, in which the workman shone through the burgess, was so
thoroughly in keeping with the man’s character, defects, and way of
life, that he might have come ready dressed into the world. You could no
more imagine him apart from his clothes than you could think of a
bulb without its husk. If the old printer had not long since given the
measure of his blind greed, the very nature of the man came out in the
manner of his abdication.
Knowing, as he did, that his son must have learned his business pretty
thoroughly in the great school of the Didots, he had yet been ruminating
for a long while over the bargain that he meant to drive with David.
All that the father made, the son, of course, was bound to lose, but
in business this worthy knew nothing of father or son. If, in the first
instance, he had looked on David as his only child, later he came to
regard him as the natural purchaser of the business, whose interests
were therefore his own. Séchard meant to sell dear; David, of course, to
buy cheap; his son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it was his duty
to get the better of him. The transformation of sentiment into
self-seeking, ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy in
better educated people, was swift and direct in the old “bear,” who
demonstrated the superiority of shrewd tipple-ography over book-learned
typography.
David came home, and the old man received him with all the cordiality
which cunning folk can assume with an eye to business. He was as full
of thought for him as any lover for his mistress; giving him his arm,
telling him where to put his foot down so as to avoid the mud, warming
the bed for him, lighting a fire in his room, making his supper ready.
The next day, after he had done his best to fluster his son’s wits over
a sumptuous dinner, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, after copious potations,
began with a “Now for business,” a remark so singularly misplaced
between two hiccoughs, that David begged his parent to postpone serious
matters until the morrow. But the old “bear” was by no means inclined to
put off the long-expected battle; he was too well prepared to turn his
tipsiness to good account. He had dragged the chain these fifty years,
he would not wear it another hour; to-morrow his son should be the
“gaffer.”
Perhaps a word or two about the business premises may be said here. The
printing-house had been established since the reign of Louis XIV. in the
angle made by the Rue de Beaulieu and the Place du Mûrier; it had been
devoted to its present purposes for a long time past. The ground floor
consisted of a single huge room lighted on the side next the street by
an old-fashioned casement, and by a large sash window that gave upon the
yard at the back. A passage at the side led to the private office;
but in the provinces the processes of typography excite such a lively
interest, that customers usually preferred to enter by way of the glass
door in the street front, though they at once descended three steps, for
the floor of the workshop lay below the level of the street. The gaping
newcomer always failed to note the perils of the passage through the
shop; and while staring at the sheets of paper strung in groves across
the ceiling, ran against the rows of cases, or knocked his hat against
the tie-bars that secured the presses in position. Or the customer’s
eyes would follow the agile movements of a compositor, picking out type
from the hundred and fifty-two compartments of his case, reading his
copy, verifying the words in the composing-stick, and leading the lines,
till a ream of damp paper weighted with heavy slabs, and set down in the
middle of the gangway, tripped up the bemused spectator, or he caught
his hip against the angle of a bench, to the huge delight of boys,
“bears,” and “monkeys.” No wight had ever been known to reach the
further end without accident. A couple of glass-windowed cages had been
built out into the yard at the back; the foreman sat in state in the
one, the master printer in the other. Out in the yard the walls were
agreeably decorated by trellised vines, a tempting bit of color,
considering the owner’s reputation. On the one side of the space stood
the kitchen, on the other the woodshed, and in a ramshackle penthouse
against the hall at the back, the paper was trimmed and damped down.
Here, too, the forms, or, in ordinary language, the masses of set-up
type, were washed. Inky streams issuing thence blended with the ooze
from the kitchen sink, and found their way into the kennel in the street
outside; till peasants coming into the town of a market day believed
that the Devil was taking a wash inside the establishment.
As to the house above the printing office, it consisted of three rooms
on the first floor and a couple of attics in the roof. The first room
did duty as dining-room and lobby; it was exactly the same length as
the passage below, less the space taken up by the old-fashioned wooden
staircase; and was lighted by a narrow casement on the street and a
bull’s-eye window looking into the yard. The chief characteristic of the
apartment was a cynic simplicity, due to money-making greed. The bare
walls were covered with plain whitewash, the dirty brick floor had never
been scoured, the furniture consisted of three rickety chairs, a round
table, and a sideboard stationed between the two doors of a bedroom
and a sitting-room. Windows and doors alike were dingy with accumulated
grime. Reams of blank paper or printed matter usually encumbered the
floor, and more frequently than not the remains of Séchard’s dinner,
empty bottles and plates, were lying about on the packages.
The bedroom was lighted on the side of the yard by a window with leaded
panes, and hung with the old-world tapestry that decorated house fronts
in provincial towns on Corpus Christi Day. For furniture it boasted
a vast four-post bedstead with canopy, valances and quilt of crimson
serge, a couple of worm-eaten armchairs, two tapestry-covered chairs in
walnut wood, an aged bureau, and a timepiece on the mantel-shelf. The
Seigneur Rouzeau, Jérôme-Nicolas’ master and predecessor, had furnished
the homely old-world room; it was just as he had left it.
The sitting-room had been partly modernized by the late Mme. Séchard;
the walls were adorned with a wainscot, fearful to behold, painted
the color of powder blue. The panels were decorated with
wall-paper--Oriental scenes in sepia tint--and for all furniture,
half-a-dozen chairs with lyre-shaped backs and blue leather cushions
were ranged round the room. The two clumsy arched windows that gave upon
the Place du Mûrier were curtainless; there was neither clock nor candle
sconce nor mirror above the mantel-shelf, for Mme. Séchard had died
before she carried out her scheme of decoration; and the “bear,” unable
to conceive the use of improvements that brought in no return in money,
had left it at this point.
Hither, _pede titubante_, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard brought his son, and
pointed to a sheet of paper lying on the table--a valuation of plant
drawn up by the foreman under his direction.
“Read that, my boy,” said Jérôme-Nicolas, rolling a drunken eye from the
paper to his son, and back to the paper. “You will see what a jewel of a
printing-house I am giving you.”
“‘Three wooden presses, held in position by iron tie-bars, cast-iron
plates----’”
“An improvement of my own,” put in Séchard senior.
“‘----Together with all the implements, ink-tables, balls, benches, et
cetera, sixteen hundred francs!’ Why, father,” cried David, letting the
sheet fall, “these presses of yours are old sabots not worth a hundred
crowns; they are only fit for firewood.”
“Sabots?” cried old Séchard, “_Sabots_? There, take the inventory and
let us go downstairs. You will soon see whether your paltry iron-work
contrivances will work like these solid old tools, tried and trusty. You
will not have the heart after that to slander honest old presses that
go like mail coaches, and are good to last you your lifetime without
needing repairs of any sort. Sabots! Yes, sabots that are like to hold
salt enough to cook your eggs with--sabots that your father has plodded
on with these twenty years; they have helped him to make you what you
are.”
The father, without coming to grief on the way, lurched down the worn,
knotty staircase that shook under his tread. In the passage he opened
the door of the workshop, flew to the nearest press (artfully oiled
and cleaned for the occasion) and pointed out the strong oaken cheeks,
polished up by the apprentice.
“Isn’t it a love of a press?”
A wedding announcement lay in the press. The old “bear” folded down
the frisket upon the tympan, and the tympan upon the form, ran in
the carriage, worked the lever, drew out the carriage, and lifted the
frisket and tympan, all with as much agility as the youngest of the
tribe. The press, handled in this sort, creaked aloud in such fine style
that you might have thought some bird had dashed itself against the
window pane and flown away again.
“Where is the English press that could go at that pace?” the parent
asked of his astonished son.
Old Séchard hurried to the second, and then to the third in order,
repeating the manoeuvre with equal dexterity. The third presenting
to his wine-troubled eye a patch overlooked by the apprentice, with
a notable oath he rubbed it with the skirt of his overcoat, much as a
horse-dealer polishes the coat of an animal that he is trying to sell.
“With those three presses, David, you can make your nine thousand francs
a year without a foreman. As your future partner, I am opposed to your
replacing these presses by your cursed cast-iron machinery, that wears
out the type. You in Paris have been making such a to-do over that
damned Englishman’s invention--a foreigner, an enemy of France who wants
to help the ironfounders to a fortune. Oh! you wanted Stanhopes, did
you? Thanks for your Stanhopes, that cost two thousand five hundred
francs apiece, about twice as much as my three jewels put together, and
maul your type to pieces, because there is no give in them. I haven’t
book-learning like you, but you keep this well in mind, the life of the
Stanhope is the death of the type. Those three presses will serve your
turn well enough, the printing will be properly done, and folk here in
Angoulême won’t ask any more of you. You may print with presses made
of wood or iron or gold or silver, _they_ will never pay you a farthing
more.”
“‘Item,’” pursued David, “‘five thousand pounds weight of type from M.
Vaflard’s foundry----’” Didot’s apprentice could not help smiling at the
name.
“Laugh away! After twelve years of wear, that type is as good as new.
That is what I call a typefounder! M. Vaflard is an honest man, who uses
hard metal; and, to my way of thinking, the best typefounder is the one
you go to most seldom.”
“‘----Taken at ten thousand francs,’” continued David. “Ten thousand
francs, father! Why, that is two francs a pound, and the Messrs. Didot
only ask thirty-six sous for their _Cicero_! These nail-heads of yours
will only fetch the price of old metal--fivepence a pound.”
“You call M. Gillé’s italics, running-hand and round-hand, ‘nail-heads,’
do you? M. Gillé, that used to be printer to the Emperor! And type that
costs six francs a pound! masterpieces of engraving, bought only five
years ago. Some of them are as bright yet as when they came from the
foundry. Look here!”
Old Séchard pounced upon some packets of unused sorts, and held them out
for David to see.
“I am not book-learned; I don’t know how to read or write; but, all
the same, I know enough to see that M. Gillé’s sloping letters are
the fathers of your Messrs. Didot’s English running-hand. Here is the
round-hand,” he went on, taking up an unused pica type.
David saw that there was no way of coming to terms with his father. It
was a case of Yes or No--of taking or leaving it. The very ropes across
the ceiling had gone down into the old “bear’s” inventory, and not the
smallest item was omitted; jobbing chases, wetting-boards, paste-pots,
rinsing-trough, and lye-brushes had all been put down and valued
separately with miserly exactitude. The total amounted to thirty
thousand francs, including the license and the goodwill. David asked
himself whether or not this thing was feasible.
Old Séchard grew uneasy over his son’s silence; he would rather have had
stormy argument than a wordless acceptance of the situation. Chaffering
in these sorts of bargains means that a man can look after his
interests. “A man who is ready to pay you anything you ask will pay
nothing,” old Séchard was saying to himself. While he tried to follow
his son’s train of thought, he went through the list of odds and ends
of plant needed by a country business, drawing David now to a hot-press,
now to a cutting-press, bragging of its usefulness and sound condition.
“Old tools are always the best tools,” said he. “In our line of business
they ought to fetch more than the new, like goldbeaters’ tools.”
Hideous vignettes, representing Hymen and Cupids, skeletons raising the
lids of their tombs to describe a V or an M, and huge borders of masks
for theatrical posters became in turn objects of tremendous value
through old Jérôme-Nicolas’ vinous eloquence. Old custom, he told his
son, was so deeply rooted in the district that he (David) would only
waste his pains if he gave them the finest things in life. He himself
had tried to sell them a better class of almanac than the _Double
Liégeois_ on grocers’ paper; and what came of it?--the original _Double
Liégeois_ sold better than the most sumptuous calendars. David would
soon see the importance of these old-fashioned things when he found he
could get more for them than for the most costly new-fangled articles.
“Aha! my boy, Paris is Paris, and the provinces are the provinces. If a
man came in from L’Houmeau with an order for wedding cards, and you were
to print them without a Cupid and garlands, he would not believe that
he was properly married; you would have them all back again if you sent
them out with a plain M on them after the style of your Messrs. Didot.
They may be fine printers, but their inventions won’t take in the
provinces for another hundred years. So there you are.”
A generous man is a bad bargain-driver. David’s nature was of the
sensitive and affectionate type that shrinks from a dispute, and gives
way at once if an opponent touches his feelings. His loftiness of
feeling, and the fact that the old toper had himself well in hand, put
him still further at a disadvantage in a dispute about money matters
with his own father, especially as he credited that father with the best
intentions, and took his covetous greed for a printer’s attachment to
his old familiar tools. Still, as Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard had taken the
whole place over from Rouzeau’s widow for ten thousand francs, paid in
assignats, it stood to reason that thirty thousand francs in coin at the
present day was an exorbitant demand.
“Father, you are cutting my throat!” exclaimed David.
“_I_,” cried the old toper, raising his hand to the lines of cord across
the ceiling, “I who gave you life? Why, David, what do you suppose the
license is worth? Do you know that the sheet of advertisements alone, at
fivepence a line, brought in five hundred francs last month? You turn
up the books, lad, and see what we make by placards and the registers at
the Prefecture, and the work for the mayor’s office, and the bishop too.
You are a do-nothing that has no mind to get on. You are haggling
over the horse that will carry you to some pretty bit of property like
Marsac.”
Attached to the valuation of plant there was a deed of partnership
between Séchard senior and his son. The good father was to let his
house and premises to the new firm for twelve hundred francs per annum,
reserving one of the two rooms in the roof for himself. So long as
David’s purchase-money was not paid in full, the profits were to be
divided equally; as soon as he paid off his father, he was to be made
sole proprietor of the business.
David made a mental calculation of the value of the license, the
goodwill, and the stock of paper, leaving the plant out of account. It
was just possible, he thought, to clear off the debt. He accepted the
conditions. Old Séchard, accustomed to peasants’ haggling, knowing
nothing of the wider business views of Paris, was amazed at such a
prompt conclusion.
“Can he have been putting money by?” he asked himself. “Or is he
scheming out, at this moment, some way of not paying me?”
With this notion in his head, he tried to find out whether David had any
money with him; he wanted to be paid something on account. The old man’s
inquisitiveness roused his son’s distrust; David remained close buttoned
up to the chin.
Next day, old Séchard made the apprentice move all his own household
stuff up into the attic until such time as an empty market cart could
take it out on the return journey into the country; and David entered
into possession of three bare, unfurnished rooms on the day that saw him
installed in the printing-house, without one sou wherewith to pay his
men’s wages. When he asked his father, as a partner, to contribute
his share towards the working expenses, the old man pretended not to
understand. He had found the printing-house, he said, and he was not
bound to find the money too. He had paid his share. Pressed close by
his son’s reasoning, he answered that when he himself had paid Rouzeau’s
widow he had not had a penny left. If he, a poor, ignorant working man,
had made his way, Didot’s apprentice should do still better. Besides,
had not David been earning money, thanks to an education paid for by
the sweat of his old father’s brow? Now surely was the time when the
education would come in useful.
“What have you done with your ‘polls?’” he asked, returning to
the charge. He meant to have light on a problem which his son left
unresolved the day before.
“Why, had I not to live?” David asked indignantly, “and books to buy
besides?”
“Oh! you bought books, did you? You will make a poor man of business. A
man that buys books is hardly fit to print them,” retorted the “bear.”
Then David endured the most painful of humiliations--the sense of shame
for a parent; there was nothing for it but to be passive while his
father poured out a flood of reasons--sordid, whining, contemptible,
money-getting reasons--in which the niggardly old man wrapped his
refusal. David crushed down his pain into the depths of his soul; he saw
that he was alone; saw that he had no one to look to but himself; saw,
too, that his father was trying to make money out of him; and in a
spirit of philosophical curiosity, he tried to find out how far the old
man would go. He called old Séchard’s attention to the fact that he
had never as yet made any inquiry as to his mother’s fortune; if that
fortune would not buy the printing-house, it might go some ways towards
paying the working expenses.
“Your mother’s fortune?” echoed old Séchard; “why, it was her beauty and
intelligence!”
David understood his father thoroughly after that answer; he understood
that only after an interminable, expensive, and disgraceful lawsuit
could he obtain any account of the money which by rights was his. The
noble heart accepted the heavy burden laid upon it, seeing clearly
beforehand how difficult it would be to free himself from the
engagements into which he had entered with his father.
“I will work,” he said to himself. “After all, if I have a rough time of
it, so had the old man; besides, I shall be working for myself, shall I
not?”
“I am leaving you a treasure,” said Séchard, uneasy at his son’s
silence.
David asked what the treasure might be.
“Marion!” said his father.
Marion, a big country girl, was an indispensable part of the
establishment. It was Marion who damped the paper and cut it to size;
Marion did the cooking, washing, and marketing; Marion unloaded the
paper carts, collected accounts, and cleaned the ink-balls; and if
Marion had but known how to read, old Séchard would have put her to set
up type into the bargain.
Old Séchard set out on foot for the country. Delighted as he was with
his sale of the business, he was not quite easy in his mind as to the
payment. To the throes of the vendor, the agony of uncertainty as to the
completion of the purchase inevitably succeeds. Passion of every sort
is essentially jesuitical. Here was a man who thought that education was
useless, forcing himself to believe in the influence of education.
He was mortgaging thirty thousand francs upon the ideas of honor and
conduct which education should have developed in his son; David had
received a good training, so David would sweat blood and water to fulfil
his engagements; David’s knowledge would discover new resources; and
David seemed to be full of fine feelings, so--David would pay! Many a
parent does in this way, and thinks that he has acted a father’s part;
old Séchard was quite of that opinion by the time that he had reached
his vineyard at Marsac, a hamlet some four leagues out of Angoulême. The
previous owner had built a nice little house on the bit of property, and
from year to year had added other bits of land to it, until in 1809 the
old “bear” bought the whole, and went thither, exchanging the toil of
the printing press for the labor of the winepress. As he put it himself,
“he had been in that line so long that he ought to know something about
it.”
During the first twelvemonth of rural retirement, Séchard senior showed
a careful countenance among his vine props; for he was always in his
vineyard now, just as, in the old days, he had lived in his shop,
day in, day out. The prospect of thirty thousand francs was even more
intoxicating than sweet wine; already in imagination he fingered the
coin. The less the claim to the money, the more eager he grew to pouch
it. Not seldom his anxieties sent him hurrying from Marsac to Angoulême;
he would climb up the rocky staircases into the old city and walk into
his son’s workshop to see how business went. There stood the presses
in their places; the one apprentice, in a paper cap, was cleaning the
ink-balls; there was a creaking of a press over the printing of some
trade circular, the old type was still unchanged, and in the dens at the
end of the room he saw his son and the foreman reading books, which the
“bear” took for proof-sheets. Then he would join David at dinner and go
back to Marsac, chewing the cud of uneasy reflection.
Avarice, like love, has the gift of second sight, instinctively guessing
at future contingencies, and hugging its presentiments. Séchard senior
living at a distance, far from the workshop and the machinery which
possessed such a fascination for him, reminding him, as it did, of days
when he was making his way, could _feel_ that there were disquieting
symptoms of inactivity in his son. The name of Cointet Brothers haunted
him like a dread; he saw Séchard & Son dropping into the second place.
In short, the old man scented misfortune in the wind.
His presentiments were too well founded; disaster was hovering over the
house of Séchard. But there is a tutelary deity for misers, and by a
chain of unforeseen circumstances that tutelary deity was so ordering
matters that the purchase-money of his extortionate bargain was to be
tumbled after all into the old toper’s pouch.
Indifferent to the religious reaction brought about by the Restoration,
indifferent no less to the Liberal movement, David preserved a most
unlucky neutrality on the burning questions of the day. In those times
provincial men of business were bound to profess political opinions of
some sort if they meant to secure custom; they were forced to choose for
themselves between the patronage of the Liberals on the one hand or the
Royalists on the other. And Love, moreover, had come to David’s heart,
and with his scientific preoccupation and finer nature he had not room
for the dogged greed of which your successful man of business is made; it
choked the keen money-getting instinct which would have led him to study
the differences between the Paris trade and the business of a provincial
printing-house. The shades of opinion so sharply defined in the country
are blurred and lost in the great currents of Parisian business life.
Cointet Brothers set themselves deliberately to assimilate all shades
of monarchical opinion. They let every one know that they fasted of a
Friday and kept Lent; they haunted the cathedral; they cultivated the
society of the clergy; and in consequence, when books of devotion were
once more in demand, Cointet Brothers were the first in this lucrative
field. They slandered David, accusing him of Liberalism, Atheism, and
what not. How, asked they, could any one employ a man whose father had
been a Septembrist, a Bonapartist, and a drunkard to boot? The old man
was sure to leave plenty of gold pieces behind him. They themselves were
poor men with families to support, while David was a bachelor and could
do as he pleased; he would have plenty one of these days; he could
afford to take things easily; whereas... and so forth and so forth.
Such tales against David, once put into circulation, produced their
effect. The monopoly of the prefectorial and diocesan work passed
gradually into the hands of Cointet Brothers; and before long David’s
keen competitors, emboldened by his inaction, started a second local
sheet of advertisements and announcements. The older establishment
was left at length with the job-printing orders from the town, and the
circulation of the _Charente Chronicle_ fell off by one-half. Meanwhile
the Cointets grew richer; they had made handsome profits on their
devotional books; and now they offered to buy Séchard’s paper, to have
all the trade and judicial announcements of the department in their own
hands.
The news of this proposal sent by David to his father brought the old
vinegrower from Marsac into the Place du Mûrier with the swiftness of
the raven that scents the corpses on a battlefield.
“Leave me to manage the Cointets,” said he to his son; “don’t you meddle
in this business.”
The old man saw what the Cointets meant; and they took alarm at his
clearsighted sagacity. His son was making a blunder, he said, and he,
Séchard, had come to put a stop to it.
“What was to become of the connection if David gave up the paper? It
all depended upon the paper. All the attorneys and solicitors and men of
business in L’Houmeau were Liberals to a man. The Cointets had tried to
ruin the Séchards by accusing them of Liberalism, and by so doing gave
them a plank to cling to--the Séchards should keep the Liberal business.
Sell the paper indeed! Why, you might as well sell the stock-in-trade
and the license!”
Old Séchard asked the Cointets sixty thousand francs for the printing
business, so as not to ruin his son; he was fond of his son; he was
taking his son’s part. The vinegrower brought his son to the front to
gain his point, as a peasant brings in his wife.
His son was unwilling to do this, that, or the other; it varied
according to the offers which he wrung one after another from the
Cointets, until, not without an effort, he drew them on to give
twenty-two thousand francs for the _Charente Chronicle_. But, at the
same time, David must pledge himself thenceforward to print no newspaper
whatsoever, under a penalty of thirty thousand francs for damages.
That transaction dealt the deathblow to the Séchard establishment; but
the old vinegrower did not trouble himself much on that head. Murder
usually follows robbery. Our worthy friend intended to pay himself with
the ready money. To have the cash in his own hands he would have given
in David himself over and above the bargain, and so much the more
willingly since that this nuisance of a son could claim one-half of the
unexpected windfall. Taking this fact into consideration, therefore, the
generous parent consented to abandon his share of the business but not
the business premises; and the rental was still maintained at the famous
sum of twelve hundred francs per annum.
The old man came into town very seldom after the paper was sold to the
Cointets. He pleaded his advanced age, but the truth was that he took
little interest in the establishment now that it was his no longer.
Still, he could not quite shake off his old kindness for his
stock-in-trade; and when business brought him into Angoulême, it would
have been hard to say which was the stronger attraction to the old
house--his wooden presses or the son whom (as a matter of form) he asked
for rent. The old foreman, who had gone over to the rival establishment,
knew exactly how much this fatherly generosity was worth; the old fox
meant to reserve a right to interfere in his son’s affairs, and had
taken care to appear in the bankruptcy as a privileged creditor for
arrears of rent.
The causes of David’s heedlessness throw a light on the character of
that young man. Only a few days after his establishment in the paternal
printing office, he came across an old school friend in the direst
poverty. Lucien Chardon, a young fellow of one-and-twenty or
thereabouts, was the son of a surgeon-major who had retired with a
wound from the republican army. Nature had meant M. Chardon senior for
a chemist; chance opened the way for a retail druggist’s business in
Angoulême. After many years of scientific research, death cut him off in
the midst of his incompleted experiments, and the great discovery that
should have brought wealth to the family was never made. Chardon had
tried to find a specific for the gout. Gout is a rich man’s malady; the
rich will pay large sums to recover health when they have lost it, and
for this reason the druggist deliberately selected gout as his problem.
Halfway between the man of science on the one side and the charlatan on
the other, he saw that the scientific method was the one road to assured
success, and had studied the causes of the complaint, and based his
remedy on a certain general theory of treatment, with modifications in
practice for varying temperaments. Then, on a visit to Paris undertaken
to solicit the approval of the _Académie des Sciences_, he died, and
lost all the fruits of his labors.
It may have been that some presentiment of the end had led the country
druggist to do all that in him lay to give his boy and girl a good
education; the family had been living up to the income brought in by
the business; and now when they were left almost destitute, it was an
aggravation of their misfortune that they had been brought up in the
expectations of a brilliant future; for these hopes were extinguished
by their father’s death. The great Desplein, who attended Chardon in his
last illness, saw him die in convulsions of rage.
The secret of the army surgeon’s ambition lay in his passionate love
for his wife, the last survivor of the family of Rubempré, saved as by
a miracle from the guillotine in 1793. He had gained time by declaring
that she was pregnant, a lie told without the girl’s knowledge or
consent. Then, when in a manner he had created a claim to call her his
wife, he had married her in spite of their common poverty. The children
of this marriage, like all children of love, inherited the mother’s
wonderful beauty, that gift so often fatal when accompanied by poverty.
The life of hope and hard work and despair, in all of which Mme.
Chardon had shared with such keen sympathy, had left deep traces in her
beautiful face, just as the slow decline of a scanty income had changed
her ways and habits; but both she and her children confronted evil
days bravely enough. She sold the druggist’s shop in the Grand’ Rue de
L’Houmeau, the principal suburb of Angoulême; but it was impossible for
even one woman to exist on the three hundred francs of income brought
in by the investment of the purchase-money, so the mother and daughter
accepted the position, and worked to earn a living. The mother went
out as a monthly nurse, and for her gentle manners was preferred to any
other among the wealthy houses, where she lived without expense to
her children, and earned some seven francs a week. To save her son the
embarrassment of seeing his mother reduced to this humble position, she
assumed the name of Madame Charlotte; and persons requiring her services
were requested to apply to M. Postel, M. Chardon’s successor in the
business. Lucien’s sister worked for a laundress, a decent woman much
respected in L’Houmeau, and earned fifteen daily sous. As Mme. Prieur’s
forewoman she had a certain position in the workroom, which raised her
slightly above the class of working-girls.
The two women’s slender earnings, together with Mme. Chardon’s three
hundred francs of _rentes_, amounted to about eight hundred francs a
year, and on this sum three persons must be fed, clothed, and lodged.
Yet, with all their frugal thrift, the pittance was scarcely sufficient;
nearly the whole of it was needed for Lucien. Mme. Chardon and her
daughter Eve believed in Lucien as Mahomet’s wife believed in her
husband; their devotion for his future knew no bounds. Their present
landlord was the successor to the business, for M. Postel let them have
rooms at the further end of a yard at the back of the laboratory for
a very low rent, and Lucien slept in the poor garret above. A father’s
passion for natural science had stimulated the boy, and at first induced
him to follow in the same path. Lucien was one of the most brilliant
pupils at the grammar school of Angoulême, and when David Séchard left,
his future friend was in the third form.
When chance brought the school-fellows together again, Lucien was weary
of drinking from the rude cup of penury, and ready for any of the rash,
decisive steps that youth takes at the age of twenty. David’s generous
offer of forty francs a month if Lucien would come to him and learn the
work of a printer’s reader came in time; David had no need whatever of a
printer’s reader, but he saved Lucien from despair. The ties of a
school friendship thus renewed were soon drawn closer than ever by
the similarity of their lot in life and the dissimilarity of their
characters. Both felt high swelling hopes of manifold success; both
consciously possessed the high order of intelligence which sets a man on
a level with lofty heights, consigned though they were socially to the
lowest level. Fate’s injustice was a strong bond between them. And
then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had
attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields
of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through
literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines
to poetry, was drawn by his tastes towards natural science.
The exchange of roles was the beginning of an intellectual comradeship.
Before long, Lucien told David of his own father’s farsighted views of
the application of science to manufacture, while David pointed out the
new ways in literature that Lucien must follow if he meant to succeed.
Not many days had passed before the young men’s friendship became a
passion such as is only known in early manhood. Then it was that David
caught a glimpse of Eve’s fair face, and loved, as grave and meditative
natures can love. The _et nunc et semper et in secula seculorum_ of the
Liturgy is the device taken by many a sublime unknown poet, whose works
consist in magnificent epics conceived and lost between heart and heart.
With a lover’s insight, David read the secret hopes set by the mother
and sister on Lucien’s poet’s brow; and knowing their blind devotion,
it was very sweet to him to draw nearer to his love by sharing her hopes
and her self-sacrifice. And in this way Lucien came to be David’s chosen
brother. As there are ultras who would fain be more Royalist than the
King, so David outdid the mother and sister in his belief in Lucien’s
genius; he spoiled Lucien as a mother spoils her child.
Once, under pressure of the lack of money which tied their hands, the
two were ruminating after the manner of young men over ways of promptly
realizing a large fortune; and, after fruitless shakings of all the
trees already stripped by previous comers, Lucien bethought himself of
two of his father’s ideas. M. Chardon had talked of a method of refining
sugar by a chemical process, which would reduce the cost of production
by one-half; and he had another plan for employing an American vegetable
fibre for making paper, something after the Chinese fashion, and
effecting an enormous saving in the cost of raw material. David, knowing
the importance of a question raised already by the Didots, caught at
this latter notion, saw a fortune in it, and looked upon Lucien as the
benefactor whom he could never repay.
Any one may guess how the ruling thoughts and inner life of this pair of
friends unfitted them for carrying on the business of a printing house.
So far from making fifteen to twenty thousand francs, like Cointet
Brothers, printers and publishers to the diocese, and proprietors of the
_Charente Chronicle_ (now the only newspaper in the department)--Séchard
& Son made a bare three hundred francs per month, out of which the
foreman’s salary must be paid, as well as Marion’s wages and the rent
and taxes; so that David himself was scarcely making twelve hundred
francs per annum. Active and industrious men of business would have
bought new type and new machinery, and made an effort to secure orders
for cheap printing from the Paris book trade; but master and foreman,
deep in absorbing intellectual interests, were quite content with such
orders as came to them from their remaining customers.
In the long length the Cointets had come to understand David’s character
and habits. They did not slander him now; on the contrary, wise policy
required that they should allow the business to flicker on; it was to
their interest indeed to maintain it in a small way, lest it should fall
into the hands of some more formidable competitor; they made a practice
of sending prospectuses and circulars--job-printing, as it is called--to
the Séchard’s establishment. So it came about that, all unwittingly,
David owed his existence, commercially speaking, to the cunning schemes
of his competitors. The Cointets, well pleased with his “craze,” as they
called it, behaved to all appearance both fairly and handsomely; but,
as a matter of fact, they were adopting the tactics of the mail-coach
owners who set up a sham opposition coach to keep _bona fide_ rivals out
of the field.
Inside and outside, the condition of the Séchard printing establishment
bore testimony to the sordid avarice of the old “bear,” who never spent
a penny on repairs. The old house had stood in sun and rain, and borne
the brunt of the weather, till it looked like some venerable tree trunk
set down at the entrance of the alley, so riven it was with seams and
cracks of all sorts and sizes. The house front, built of brick and
stone, with no pretensions to symmetry, seemed to be bending beneath the
weight of a worm-eaten roof covered with the curved pantiles in common
use in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the
heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place
by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more
dilapidated house in Angoulême; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar
kept it together. Try to picture the workshop, lighted at either end,
and dark in the middle; the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by
friction of all the workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty years;
the cobweb of cordage across the ceiling, the stacks of paper, the
old-fashioned presses, the pile of slabs for weighting the damp sheets,
the rows of cases, and the two dens in the far corners where the master
printer and foreman sat--and you will have some idea of the life led by
the two friends.
One day early in May, 1821, David and Lucien were standing together by
the window that looked into the yard. It was nearly two o’clock, and
the four or five men were going out to dinner. David waited until the
apprentice had shut the street door with the bell fastened to it; then
he drew Lucien out into the yard as if the smell of paper, ink, and
presses and old woodwork had grown intolerable to him, and together they
sat down under the vines, keeping the office and the door in view. The
sunbeams, playing among the trellised vine-shoots, hovered over the two
poets, making, as it were, an aureole about their heads, bringing the
contrast between their faces and their characters into a vigorous relief
that would have tempted the brush of some great painter.
David’s physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter, the
man born to struggle in obscurity, or with the eyes of all men turned
upon him. The strong shoulders, rising above the broad chest, were in
keeping with the full development of his whole frame. With his thick
crop of black hair, his fleshy, high-colored, swarthy face, supported by
a thick neck, he looked at first sight like one of Boileau’s canons; but
on a second glance there was that in the lines about the thick lips,
in the dimple of the chin, in the turn of the square nostrils, with the
broad irregular line of central cleavage, and, above all, in the eyes,
with the steady light of an all-absorbing love that burned in them,
which revealed the real character of the man--the wisdom of the thinker,
the strenuous melancholy of a spirit that discerns the horizon on either
side, and sees clearly to the end of winding ways, turning the clear
light of analysis upon the joys of fruition, known as yet in idea alone,
and quick to turn from them in disgust. You might look for the flash of
genius from such a face; you could not miss the ashes of the volcano;
hopes extinguished beneath a profound sense of the social annihilation
to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier
mind. And by the side of the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so
closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless,
self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and
of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the
intoxication of soul and brain, stood Lucien, graceful as some
sculptured Indian Bacchus.
For in Lucien’s face there was the distinction of line which stamps the
beauty of the antique; the Greek profile, with the velvet whiteness of
women’s faces, and eyes full of love, eyes so blue that they looked dark
against a pearly setting, and dewy and fresh as those of a child. Those
beautiful eyes looked out from under their long chestnut lashes, beneath
eyebrows that might have been traced by a Chinese pencil. The silken
down on his cheeks, like his bright curling hair, shone golden in the
sunlight. A divine graciousness transfused the white temples that caught
that golden gleam; a matchless nobleness had set its seal in the short
chin raised, but not abruptly. The smile that hovered about the coral
lips, yet redder as they seemed by force of contrast with the even
teeth, was the smile of some sorrowing angel. Lucien’s hands denoted
race; they were shapely hands; hands that men obey at a sign, and women
love to kiss. Lucien was slender and of middle height. From a glance at
his feet, he might have been taken for a girl in disguise, and this
so much the more easily from the feminine contour of the hips, a
characteristic of keen-witted, not to say, astute, men. This is a
trait which seldom misleads, and in Lucien it was a true indication of
character; for when he analyzed the society of to-day, his restless mind
was apt to take its stand on the lower ground of those diplomatists who
hold that success justifies the use of any means however base. It is one
of the misfortunes attendant upon great intellects that perforce they
comprehend all things, both good and evil.
The two young men judged society by the more lofty standard because
their social position was at the lowest end of the scale, for
unrecognized power is apt to avenge itself for lowly station by viewing
the world from a lofty standpoint. Yet it is, nevertheless, true that
they grew but the more bitter and hopeless after these swift soaring
flights to the upper regions of thought, their world by right. Lucien
had read much and compared; David had thought much and deeply. In spite
of the young printer’s look of robust, country-bred health, his turn
of mind was melancholy and somewhat morbid--he lacked confidence in
himself; but Lucien, on the other hand, with a boldness little to be
expected from his feminine, almost effeminate, figure, graceful
though it was, Lucien possessed the Gascon temperament to the highest
degree--rash, brave, and adventurous, prone to make the most of the
bright side, and as little as possible of the dark; his was the nature
that sticks at no crime if there is anything to be gained by it, and
laughs at the vice which serves as a stepping-stone. Just now these
tendencies of ambition were held in check, partly by the fair illusions
of youth, partly by the enthusiasm which led him to prefer the nobler
methods, which every man in love with glory tries first of all. Lucien
was struggling as yet with himself and his own desires, and not with
the difficulties of life; at strife with his own power, and not with the
baseness of other men, that fatal exemplar for impressionable minds.
The brilliancy of his intellect had a keen attraction for David. David
admired his friend, while he kept him out of the scrapes into which he
was led by the _furie française_.
David, with his well-balanced mind and timid nature at variance with a
strong constitution, was by no means wanting in the persistence of the
Northern temper; and if he saw all the difficulties before him, none
the less he vowed to himself to conquer, never to give way. In him the
unswerving virtue of an apostle was softened by pity that sprang from
inexhaustible indulgence. In the friendship grown old already, one was
the worshiper, and that one was David; Lucien ruled him like a woman
sure of love, and David loved to give way. He felt that his friend’s
physical beauty implied a real superiority, which he accepted, looking
upon himself as one made of coarser and commoner human clay.
“The ox for patient labor in the fields, the free life for the bird,” he
thought to himself. “I will be the ox, and Lucien shall be the eagle.”
So for three years these friends had mingled the destinies bright with
such glorious promise. Together they read the great works that appeared
above the horizon of literature and science since the Peace--the poems
of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott, Jean-Paul,
Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more. They warmed
themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their powers in
abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again with new glow
of enthusiasm. Incessantly they worked with the unwearied vitality of
youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the consuming love of art and
science, till they forgot the hard life of the present, for their minds
were wholly bent on laying the foundations of future fame.
“Lucien,” said David, “do you know what I have just received from
Paris?” He drew a tiny volume from his pocket. “Listen!”
And David read, as a poet can read, first André de Chénier’s Idyll
_Néere_, then _Le Malade_, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide,
another elegy in the classic taste, and the last two _Iambes_.
“So that is André de Chénier!” Lucien exclaimed again and again.
“It fills one with despair!” he cried for the third time, when David
surrendered the book to him, unable to read further for emotion.--“A
poet rediscovered by a poet!” said Lucien, reading the signature of the
preface.
“After Chénier had written those poems, he thought that he had written
nothing worth publishing,” added David.
Then Lucien in his turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called
_L’Aveugle_ and two or three of the Elegies, till, when he came upon the
line--
If they know not bliss, is there happiness on earth?
He pressed the book to his lips, and tears came to the eyes of either,
for the two friends were lovers and fellow-worshipers.
The vine-stems were changing color with the spring; covering the rifted,
battered walls of the old house where squalid cracks were spreading
in every direction, with fluted columns and knots and bas-reliefs and
uncounted masterpieces of I know not what order of architecture, erected
by fairy hands. Fancy had scattered flowers and crimson gems over the
gloomy little yard, and Chénier’s _Camille_ became for David the Eve
whom he worshiped, for Lucien a great lady to whom he paid his homage.
Poetry had shaken out her starry robe above the workshop where the
“monkeys” and “bears” were grotesquely busy among types and presses.
Five o’clock struck, but the friends felt neither hunger nor thirst;
life had turned to a golden dream, and all the treasures of the world
lay at their feet. Far away on the horizon lay the blue streak to which
Hope points a finger in storm and stress; and a siren voice sounded in
their ears, calling, “Come, spread your wings; through that streak of
gold or silver or azure lies the sure way of escape from evil fortune!”
Just at that moment the low glass door of the workshop was opened,
and out came Cérizet, an apprentice (David had brought the urchin
from Paris). This youth introduced a stranger, who saluted the friends
politely, and spoke to David.
“This, sir, is a monograph which I am desirous of printing,” said he,
drawing a huge package of manuscript from his pocket. “Will you oblige
me with an estimate?”
“We do not undertake work on such a scale, sir,” David answered, without
looking at the manuscript. “You had better see the Messieurs Cointet
about it.”
“Still we have a very pretty type which might suit it,” put in Lucien,
taking up the roll. “We must ask you to be kind enough, sir, to leave
your commission with us and call again to-morrow, and we will give you
an estimate.”
“Have I the pleasure of addressing M. Lucien Chardon?”
“Yes, sir,” said the foreman.
“I am fortunate in this opportunity of meeting with a young poet
destined to such greatness,” returned the author. “Mme. de Bargeton sent
me here.”
Lucien flushed red at the name, and stammered out something about
gratitude for the interest which Mme. de Bargeton took in him. David
noticed his friend’s embarrassed flush, and left him in conversation
with the country gentleman, the author of a monograph on silkwork
cultivation, prompted by vanity to print the effort for the benefit of
fellow-members of the local agricultural society.
When the author had gone, David spoke.
“Lucien, are you in love with Mme. de Bargeton?”
“Passionately.”
“But social prejudices set you as far apart as if she were living at
Pekin and you in Greenland.”
“The will of two lovers can rise victorious over all things,” said
Lucien, lowering his eyes.
“You will forget us,” returned the alarmed lover, as Eve’s fair face
rose before his mind.
“On the contrary, I have perhaps sacrificed my love to you,” cried
Lucien.
“What do you mean?”
“In spite of my love, in spite of the different motives which bid me
obtain a secure footing in her house, I have told her that I will never
go thither again unless another is made welcome too, a man whose gifts
are greater than mine, a man destined for a brilliant future--David
Séchard, my brother, my friend. I shall find an answer waiting when I go
home. All the aristocrats may have been asked to hear me read my verses
this evening, but I shall not go if the answer is negative, and I will
never set foot in Mme. de Bargeton’s house again.”
David brushed the tears from his eyes, and wrung Lucien’s hand. The
clock struck six.
“Eve must be anxious; good-bye,” Lucien added abruptly.
He hurried away. David stood overcome by the emotion that is only
felt to the full at his age, and more especially in such a position as
his--the friends were like two young swans with wings unclipped as yet
by the experiences of provincial life.
“Heart of gold!” David exclaimed to himself, as his eyes followed Lucien
across the workshop.
Lucien went down to L’Houmeau along the broad Promenade de Beaulieu, the
Rue du Minage, and Saint-Peter’s Gate. It was the longest way round,
so you may be sure that Mme. de Bargeton’s house lay on the way. So
delicious it was to pass under her windows, though she knew nothing of
his presence, that for the past two months he had gone round daily by
the Palet Gate into L’Houmeau.
Under the trees of Beaulieu he saw how far the suburb lay from the city.
The custom of the country, moreover, had raised other barriers harder to
surmount than the mere physical difficulty of the steep flights of
steps which Lucien was descending. Youth and ambition had thrown the
flying-bridge of glory across the gulf between the city and the suburb,
yet Lucien was as uneasy in his mind over his lady’s answer as any
king’s favorite who has tried to climb yet higher, and fears that being
over-bold he is like to fall. This must seem a dark saying to those who
have never studied the manners and customs of cities divided into the
upper and lower town; wherefore it is necessary to enter here upon some
topographical details, and this so much the more if the reader is
to comprehend the position of one of the principal characters in the
story--Mme. de Bargeton.